The Major Works of Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes is a prolific writer. He has published several volumes of verse, each containing a substantial number of poems. Given below are the titles of the various volumes of verse published by him, and the titles of the more important of the poems in each volume.

“THE HAWK IN THE RAIN” (1957)

The more important poems in this volume are:

The Hawk in the Rain

The Thought-Fox

The Jaguar Soliloquy

The Horses Egg-Head

The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar.

“LUPERCAL” (1970)

The more important of the poems in this volume are:

Mayday on Holdemess

Esther’s Tomcat

Hawk Roosting

The Bull Moses

Cat and Mouse

View of a Pig

November

An Otter

Witches

Thrushes

Snowdrop

Pike Cleopatra to the Asp

Lupercalia

“WODWO”(1967)

This volume contains some pieces of prose in addition to verse. The more important of the poems in this volume are:

Thistles

Ghost Crabs

Boom: “Bar-Room TV”

Second Glance at a Jaguar

Fern

Theology

Gog

Kreutzer Sonata

Out

Skylarks

Pibroch

The Howling of Wolves

Wodwo

“CROW” (1970)

This volume contains a sequence of poems in which the crow figures not just as a bird but as a symbol. In these poems Hughes makes use of numerous legends about creation and birth to portray the predatory, mocking, indestructible crow. The more important of these poems are:

Examination at the Womb-Door

A Childish Prank

Crow’s First Lesson

Crow Alights

Song for a Phallus

Criminal Ballad

Crow Tries the Media

Crow’s Undersong

Fragment of an Ancient Tablet

Notes for a Little Play

Snake Hymn

Lovesong

The Lovepet

That Moment

Crow Hears Fate Knock on the Door

Crow Tyrannosaurus

The Black Beast

Crow’s Account of the Battle

Crow on the Beach

Crow and the Sea

Crow’s Fall

Crow Goes Hunting

Crow’s Playmates

Apple Tragedy

Crow’s Last Stand

“GAUDETE” (1977)

This is a long narrative poem with an epilogue consisting of forty-five short poems.

“CAVE BIRDS” (1978)

The more important of the poems in this collection are:

The Executioner

The Knight Bride and Groom

The Risen

“REMAINS OF ELMET” (1979)

The poems in this volume are largely descriptions of the landscape of the CalderValley, west of Halifax, in Great Britain. This landscape had a personal appeal and significance for Hughes. A few of the poems in this volume are:

When Men Got to the Summit

Football at Slack

Dead Farms, Dead Leaves

HeptonstallOldChurch

HeptonstallCemetery

“MOORTOWN”(1979)

This volume contains a sequence of poems entitled “Prometheus on His Crag” written in Iran in 1971 in the course of an expedition by Hughes to that country. It also contains the following poems:

Roe-Deer

Ravens

Sheep

And Owl

The Dove Came

And the Phoenix Has Come

The Song

“THE RIVER” (1983)

This volume contains a sequence of poems invoking the riverside and river-life. The more important of these poems are the following:

An October Salmon

That Morning

BOOKS FOR CHILDREN

Ted Hughes wrote a number of books for children; and these must also be regarded as part of his major works. The following are the books in this category:

“Season Songs” (containing also the poem Apple Dumps)

“Under the North Star” (containing also Goose and Eagle)

“The Earth-Owl and Other Moon-People”

“The Iron Man: A Story in Five Nights”

“Meet My Folks!”

“Nessie the Mannerless Monster”

“How the Whale Became”

“The Coming of the Kings and Other Plays”

ANTHOLOGIES EDITED BY TED HUGHES

In addition to these works, Ted Hughes also edited a number of anthologies, among them the following:

“Poetry in the Making”

“A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse”

“A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse”

Summing up Ted Hughes’s achievement, a critic writes: “Together these volumes constitute interesting examples of the renewed vogue for topographical poetry (with illustrations) that arose in the environment-conscious second half of the twentieth century. Hughes’s stress on the physical, animal, and subconscious is in marked contrast to the urbane tone of “the Movement”; and his poetry, hailed as vital and original, has also been described as excessively brutal and violent”. (Topographical poetry means local poetry of which the fundamental object is some particular landscape, with the addition of historical retrospection or incidental meditation. This kind of poetry flourished mainly in the eighteenth century; but the genre had a renewed vogue in the late twentieth century when the emphasis was more on the vanishing rural scene than on country parks, estates, and gardens. Distinguished examples of twentieth-century topographical poetry are Ted Hughes’s “Remains of Elmet” (1979) and “River” (1983), already mentioned in the catalogue above. “The Movement” is a term describing a group of poets who include Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, Joseph Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, and Robert Conquest. Much of the work of these writers illustrates its anti-romantic, witty, rational, and sardonic tone).